I’ve worried in the recent past that Democrats will fail to pick their fights carefully on Bush administration appointments, and just submerge their principled objections in a white noise of white-hot rage. But Bush sure seems inclined to pick our fights for us, as evidenced by the, shall we say, rather provocative choice of John Bolton for U.N. ambassador. Is there a single constructive impulse in administration foreign policy that Bolton hasn’t mocked or rejected in the past? Hard to think of one. U.N. reform? Bolton seems to think the organization is inherently an affront to U.S. power. Collective action to stop genocide? Bolton has opposed any U.N. role in “civil conflicts,” up to and including genocide, and as the country’s best-known critic of U.S. cooperation with the International Criminal Court, he’s certainly not in a good position to propose any immediate effort to bring the Darfur murderers to justice. Engagement with China to bring that country more fully into the community of rules-observing nations? As a former hired hand of the Taiwanese government, and an outspoken proponent of formal Taiwanese independence, Bolton isn’t likely to get onto drinking-buddy terms with Beijing’s representatives at the U.N. And then there’s the really big issue on which Bolton has had formal responsibility in his current gig at the State Department: trafficking in nuclear materials. It’s no big secret that the administration until recently treated this rather urgent threat to our lives and limbs as a second- or third-order problem, on the bizarre theory that terrorists are too frightened of George W. Bush to consider setting off a nuke in one of our cities. The current Proliferation Security Initiative that Bolton has directed is a lot better than nothing, but typically, Bolton has pushed it in the direction of ad hoc, U.S.-led action to interdict and inspect suspect cargo, rather than the full-fledged, top-priority international effort to prevent “leakage” of nuclear materials that we need. Aside from his foreign policy views, Bolton is also a stone partisan warrior. I did a couple of radio shows with him back during the madness of the 2000 election cycle, and found him to be genial and cerebral until the mikes went live; at that point, he was indistinguishable from Tom DeLay. I’ll never forget turning on the tube during one of those Florida court hearings on the presidential vote and seeing Bolton sitting there in the front row of the phalanx of GOP lawyers, hour after hour. Since I don’t think the Bush legal team was in need of foreign policy advice, it was clearly an act of hyper-partisan solidarity. (According to this morning’s Post, Bolton even got into the chad-counting act at one of the county-level election boards). Soon we will begin to hear suggestions that Bolton’s appointment may be one of those Nixon-to-China things: you know, let’s go out and find the most abrasive unilateralist in the administration to patch up our relations with the rest of the world. This only makes sense if the Bushies are afraid a more constructive attitude towards the U.N. and the world in general will make them vulnerable to criticism from the almightly Conservative Base. But if this is what’s really going on, then Bolton better make it pretty damn clear during his confirmation hearings. He’s sort of the Robert Bork of foreign policy nominees: a guy with enough material in his public record to script two or three days of tough Democratic questioning. If he expects any Democratic votes at all, he’d better start wolfing down a lot of crow. Otherwise, this is just another in-yer-face appointment that begs for a fight.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 25: It Could Be Harris Over-Performing the Polls This Time
Sometimes we need to shake assumptions based on past elections, and I offered a possible example at New York:
Despite some small recent trends favoring Donald Trump, 2024 presidential polls remain stubbornly very close, both nationally (where Kamala Harris leads by 1.7 percent according to the FiveThirtyEight averages) and in the seven battleground states. Trump currently leads in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, while Harris leads in Michigan and Wisconsin, per FiveThirtyEight, but no one leads in any battleground state by more than 2 percent.
Polls are not, of course, perfect by any means. So the big question right now is whether they are “off” in some systemic way that conceals the fact that one of the two candidates is really on track for a decisive win. As it happens, two iconic political-media gurus have weighed in on this question all but simultaneously, with neither professing to have a definitive answer.
Polling and forecast wizard Nate Silver (founder of FiveThirtyEight but now out on his own) has a New York Times op-ed that expresses a “gut” view that Trump has a small advantage, but nestles it in arguments that polling errors could go in either direction. He reminds us that state polls in 2016 and both national and state polls in 2020 underestimated Trump’s vote, and also notes an explanation that could again show an underestimation of that same vote:
“[T]he likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.
“Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.”
But Silver concedes it could work so well that polls are actually overestimating Trump’s vote:
“[T]he new techniques that pollsters are applying could be overkill. One problem with using one of those — “weighting on recalled vote,” or trying to account for how voters report their pick in the last election — is that people often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner (in 2020, Mr. Biden).
“That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki drills down into some comparisons of 2024 polls and the actual 2020 vote in key demographic categories and suggests there are signs the Trump vote is now being captured fully. In Michigan and Wisconsin, ground zero for 2020 polling errors based on underestimation of white working-class voters, Trump’s lead in that demographic is actually higher than his 2020 performance. So maybe the pollsters have successfully adjusted for past polling errors. Meanwhile, the Harris camp has grounds for suspecting her ultimate vote could be poorly reflected in the polls:
“From Harris’ standpoint, part of the hope now is that polling is undercounting her support with what have long been core Democratic constituencies: Black, Hispanic and young voters …
“The concern for Harris, obviously, is that her Hispanic support is far lower than Biden’s was, both in the 2020 polls and the final election results. But much of Trump’s new Hispanic support comes from younger voters who have not participated at high levels in past elections. If these voters end up sitting on the sidelines in this election, Harris could end up faring much better with Hispanics than the polling now shows. It’s also somewhat encouraging for her that Biden performed better in the election with Black voters than polling had suggested. Harris will need this to happen again.”
There’s a reason Team Trump is devoting much of its get-out-the-vote strategy to low-propensity voters. If he doesn’t reach and motivate them, he could underperform compared to polls showing him making gains among Black, Hispanic, and first-time voters.
If the polls are wrong, it could again be good news for Trump or instead good news for Harris. We just don’t know right now, even though many fearful Democrats and triumphalist Republicans share Nate Silver’s “gut” feeling that the 45th president wins all ties.